Call centres are typically large facilities of telephone operators or ‘agents’. These centers are provided by organizations that want to interact with existing or prospective clients and customers. A call center agent normally interacts with a client or customer by taking or making telephone calls.
One use of call centers is to provide services to the public that allow payment for goods and services via telephone calls. Each year, millions of people make purchases through agents in telephone call centers, often including high value transactions. For example, family holidays and financial products are often purchased over the telephone. In these transactions, the caller is required by the agent to provide certain pieces of sensitive information in order to confirm his or her identity and/or to complete the purchase. In particular, one or more bank account numbers, and debit or credit card details including the primary account number (PAN), start date, expiry date, and the card security code (e.g. CV2).
It is an unfortunate fact of life that wherever people have access to sensitive information, it will be misused. Data and card fraud perpetrated by call center agents, as well as fraudulent financial transactions are well-documented problems that need to be addressed. By divulging identity and/or financial information to an agent for processing a transaction through a call center, a caller puts themselves at risk of having that information stolen by the agent and used for nefarious purposes.
Some solutions that prevent the agent from accessing the caller's sensitive information involve handing the call over to an IVR platform and letting the customer enter their PAN and CVC by DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) ‘touch tones’ using their telephone keypad. Other solutions allow the customer to enter their details while still in conversation with the agent using DTMF but achieving security by blocking the tones from reaching the agent and any call recording equipment. Both these schemes fall down when the caller does not have a touch tone phone or, for some reason such as disability, is unable to enter the data when requested. Such systems are described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 8,750,471.
Alternative approaches using ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) software have been used but the accuracy of these systems is not always sufficient to achieve reliable operation particularly when the caller has a regional accent or there is background noise present on the call. Whilst the grammar is very small in the case of an ASR application designed to capture card numbers (essentially digits 0-9, plus variations such as ‘double’, ‘zero’ and ‘oh’) and the accuracy achieved when recognizing a single digit may typically be of the order of 98%, the problem becomes greatly exacerbated when trying to capture a whole card number (typically 16 digits) and CVV (typically 3 digits). The result is only useable to carry out a transaction if all 19 digits are captured correctly. With each digit recognition being independent of those preceding (which is a close approximation to the case here) and an individual digit recognition accuracy of 98% the overall expected accuracy will be 0.9819 which is approximately 0.68 or 68%. This is clearly an unacceptable level of performance. Even the fact that the first digit of the PAN can normally be constrained to be one of 3, 4 or 5 and that the last digit of the PAN, which is a Luhn check digit, can be calculated from the previous 15 does little to improve the situation, improving the expected accuracy only by around 3%. This has led to the necessity of inserting clumsy verification steps into the interaction whereby the system reads back the number that it has recognized and asks the caller to confirm.
The present invention provides a solution that allows spoken digits of a caller's card number and CVV to be accurately and quickly recognized without compromising the security of the caller's information.